Consumption or usage information of a utility service (such as electricity, etc.) is valuable not only to utility service providers but also utility service consumers. Utility service providers have utility metering systems that collect utility consumption information for residential and commercial loads and can use this utility consumption information to determine or estimate an amount of utility service that has been consumed over an interval or real-time basis. In contrast, utility service consumers may receive utility consumption information only on a monthly basis, and typically well after the utility consumption actually occurred. Such infrequent feedback from the utility service does not provide adequate information to consumers to modify their behavior (e.g., to conserve electricity) in response to costs.
Furthermore, the utility service consumers have no knowledge of how much of a utility service (e.g., electricity) is consumed by each individual appliance or device on a circuit over a certain period of time, and are therefore unable to individually monitor utility service consumption and/or performance of devices.